Polyphony and the Modern (Routledge Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0367655152 ISBN 13: 9780367655150

Publisher: Routledge, 2021

Synopsis

Polyphony and the Modern asks one fundamental question: what does it mean to be modern in one’s own time? To answer that question, this volume focuses on polyphony as an index of modernity.

In The Principle of Hope, Ernst Bloch showed that each moment in time is potentially fractured: people living in the same country can effectively live in different centuries – some making their alliances with the past and others betting on the future – but all of them, at least technically, enclosed in the temporal moment. But can a claim of modernity also mean something more ambitious? Can an artist, by accident or design, escape the limits of his or her own time, and somehow precociously embody the outlook of a subsequent age?

This book sees polyphony as a bridge providing a terminology and a stylistic practice by which the period barrier between Medieval and Early Modern can be breached.

Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781003129837

About this title

About the Author

Jonathan Fruoco is an independent scholar. His research focuses on the linguistic and cultural evolution of medieval England, with a particular interest in the work of Geoffrey Chaucer and its connection with French and Italian courtly poetry. He has recently published Les faits et gestes de Robin des Bois (2017) and Chaucer’s Polyphony: The Modern in Medieval Poetry (2020).

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0367655152
• ISBN 13: 9780367655150
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272
• Editor: Fruoco Jonathan